The Execution of David O. Dodd

On the afternoon of Jan. 8, 1864, a crowd of 6,000 soldiers and civilians gathered on the parade grounds in front of St. John’s Masonic College in Union-occupied Little Rock, Ark. Some of the onlookers perched in trees hoping for a better view of the day’s events: the public hanging of 17-year-old David O. Dodd, a convicted Confederate spy.

A slight but handsome and popular boy known around town as a favorite of the young ladies, Dodd had attended St. John’s a couple of years earlier but had left school after contracting malaria. He briefly found work as an operator in telegraph offices in Little Rock and in Monroe, La., both of which had been pressed into service by the Confederacy. In January 1863, he left his position to help his father as a civilian merchant to the Third Arkansas Regiment at its camp near Granada, Ark., while his mother and two sisters remained in Little Rock.

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David O. DoddCredit Arkansas History Commission

After the Union occupied Little Rock in September 1863, Dodd returned home to help his family. His father returned three months later to relocate the family to Camden, Ark. A few weeks later, though, his father asked him to once again return to Little Rock to solicit money from friends and associates for a business opportunity. Before Dodd left, his father obtained a Confederate pass for him, as well as a note indicating his date of birth, proof that he was too young to enlist.

Somewhere along his way, Dodd met an old friend, Frank Tomlinson, who had recently joined the Confederate Army and become a courier for a brigadier general. Tomlinson’s assignment was to either carry a message into Little Rock or to obtain information on Union defenses. With Tomlinson’s mission on his mind, Dodd arrived in Little Rock on Christmas Eve; he completed his father’s business and was going to leave on Dec. 28, but changed his plans so that he could attend a dance with a girl.

The next morning, Dodd left Little Rock to go to his uncle’s home outside the city before heading to another spot to trade his mule for a horse. He had traveled eight miles when a Union picket demanded a Union pass and asked him where he was going. Dodd showed him a pass he had obtained in Little Rock and told him his route. The private, who said Dodd would be traveling outside of Union lines and would no longer need the pass, tore it up and let him continue on his way.

After Dodd picked up a pistol and some of his father’s papers at his uncle’s home, he left for his next stop, but was soon halted by another Union picket. The sergeant was suspicious because Dodd seemed to be crossing the boundary at an angle and headed toward a road that would take him to Camden, which now served as Confederate headquarters for the area. Without a Union pass to confirm Dodd’s story, the sergeant arrested Dodd and sent him to regimental headquarters with one of his men.

While being questioned by a lieutenant at headquarters, Dodd turned over a memo book he was carrying. The lieutenant knew the basics of Morse code and translated a series of dots and dashes in Dodd’s notebook about Union defenses: “3rd Ohio Battery has 4 guns, brass; 11th Ohio Battery has six guns.” Dodd had been noting information on Union defenses.

Dodd was sent to the guardhouse that night, where the regimental commander, Capt. George W. Hanna, searched him. After Dodd turned over his pistol and Confederate, federal and Louisiana currency, he insisted he had nothing else on him. But Hanna noticed a bulge in his shirt and found a package of letters from girls in Little Rock to his sisters, one of which ended with the line “I shall be very anxious to hear how Davie got through.” Hanna also found two braided locks of hair as well as Dodd’s proof of birth and Confederate pass.

With so much evidence against him, Dodd was formally accused of spying and was tried before a military commission, beginning on the last day of the year. Dodd pled not guilty and was awarded two local attorneys, who presented a written plea from Dodd offering to take an oath of allegiance. (President Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty, issued on Dec. 8, 1863, offered to pardon all Confederates who took an oath, except Confederate government officials or officers.) The commission denied Dodd’s plea, declaring that the proclamation did not offer protection from spying.

Dodd’s trial lasted six days and included a plea for mercy by his attorneys because of his young age. The commissioners weighed the evidence, found him guilty of spying and sentenced him to death by hanging.

On the morning of Jan. 8, Dodd sat down to write to his family. In measured, resigned prose, he wrote: “I was arrested as a Spy and tried and was Sentenced to be hung to day at 3 oclock. The time is fast approaching but thank God I am prepared to die. I expect to meet you all in heaven. Do not weep for me for I will be better off in heaven.”

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Just before 3 p.m., the appointed hour and day of execution, the crowds that had gathered at the parade ground saw a closely guarded wagon carrying Dodd, who sat on what would soon be his casket. The wagon headed toward a simple scaffold constructed just a few hours earlier and now surrounded by Union infantry and cavalry.

As the driver got closer and positioned the wagon under the scaffold (the tailboard of the wagon would act as the trap), a pale but calm Dodd looked at the rope before looking at the faces in the crowd. The executioner climbed into the wagon while Dodd took off his coat. When the executioner realized he’d forgotten a blindfold, Dodd said, “You will find a handkerchief in my coat.” The executioner covered Dodd’s eyes with the cloth before putting the rope around his neck and tying his hands behind his back. A reverend knelt in prayer next to a silent and still Dodd as the boy waited for the cord suspending the trap to be cut. Moments later, he was dead.

Dodd was called “the boy hero of the Confederacy” by some and a traitor to his country by others. It is unclear how much spying he actually did, and whether the notes he made were merely partisan observations inspired by his run-in with Tomlinson. In any case, he was not a spy by any strict definition. Rather, he was yet another young man caught in the confusion of heroics and death brought upon soldiers and civilians alike during the Civil War.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.